84 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
Elizabeth Debicki and Claes Bang star in Giuseppe Capotondi’s film.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
LYING TOGETHER
“ The Burnt Orange Heresy” and “The Whistlers.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
C
areer options are in constant flux.
Ambitious students who might
once have embarked upon an arduous
training in neurosurgery can now
stream the sound of panpipes, invest
in a clutch of jade eggs, and swiftly
prosper as wellness consultants. No
profession has risen quite so fast, how-
ever, as that of intimacy coördinator.
It’s a hell of a job. You hang around on
movie sets, telling people in various
states of undress what they can do to
one another, what they mustn’t even
think of when they’re doing it, what
they definitely can’t do, and, once they’ve
not done it, how to treat the nasty case
of tennis elbow that they developed
along the way.
Yet the hardiest intimacy coördina-
tor—armed with a tape measure, a pro-
tractor, a magnifying glass, and a copy
of Peter Singer’s “Practical Ethics”—
would struggle, I suspect, with “The
Burnt Orange Heresy” and “The Whis-
tlers.” These two new films have a sur-
prising amount in common. In each
case, near the start, a man and a woman
have sex. The activity itself is vanilla but
vigorous, like a frothing milkshake. But
what of the motivations?
In “The Burnt Orange Heresy,” the
spent participants, who only just met,
lounge around, in ecstasy’s wake, and riff
about what comes next. “We’ll move to
the States. Connecticut, probably. Buy
a house, porch, with a swing and a brook,”
one says. “Babbling,” the other adds. You
can sense that the riffing turns them on,
and that they’re almost certainly lying
about what brought them to this en-
counter. As for “The Whistlers,” the
couple isn’t a couple. He’s a cop and she’s
a criminal, but they’re in league, and she
pretends to be a sex worker, summoned
to his apartment, because they’re all too
aware of being watched on CCTV by
those who wish them ill. In short, what
appears to be consensual intimacy, in
both movies, is an act of deliberate car-
nal deceit. Coördinate that.
“The Burnt Orange Heresy,” directed
by Giuseppe Capotondi, stars Claes Bang
(I’m saying nothing) as an art critic named
James Figueras. Though handsomely
clean-cut, he’s ragged around the edges
in ways that are hard to define; you’d
willingly lend him money, but you
wouldn’t expect to get it back. We first
meet him in Milan, where he’s lecturing
to a group of culture buffs—spinning
them a yarn about a nonexistent painter
and then smoothly reeling them in. They
are joined by a latecomer, the elegant
Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), of
no fixed abode. She and Figueras, wast-
ing no time, become firm friends, as de-
tailed above, and he asks her along on
his next jaunt: an invitation from a
wealthy art collector, Joseph Cassidy, to
his villa on Lake Como. Tough gig.
Cassidy is played by none other than
Mick Jagger, who has graced our fea-
ture films all too rarely since he played
the reclusive rock star of “Performance”
(1970), delivering “Memo from Turner”
in a crowing drawl, among half-naked
gangsters, with Ry Cooder on slide
guitar. If Jagger’s character hadn’t been
shot at the end of that movie, you could
imagine him growing up into the com-
ically rich Maecenas of “The Burnt
Orange Heresy”—though not, as yet,
growing old. Cassidy is an extraordi-
nary figure: wicked, wrinkled, flute-
thin, flawlessly dressed, with a head too
big for his frame and a smile too big
for his head. The smile suggests a per-
petual amusement, as if he were enjoy-
ing a joke that is far too private to share.
Identifying Figueras as a fellow-knave,
Cassidy gives him a delicate sin to com-
mit. The target is Jerome Debney (Don-
ald Sutherland), the Salinger of paint-
ers—an object of both reverence and
rumor, long vanished from the public
eye. In fact, he’s dwelling quietly in the
grounds of the villa, and Figueras’s mis-
sion, should he choose to accept it, is to
steal a Debney, having inveigled him-
self into the artist’s confidence. What
(or, indeed, whether) he has been cre-
ating of late is not the point. Cassidy,
like all patrons, craves to possess.
“The Burnt Orange Heresy” began
as a 1971 novel by Charles Willeford:
cavalryman, tank commander, poet, boxer,
crime writer, and college professor. No
bio-pic could contain so thronged a life.
“Miami Blues,” published in 1984, four
years before his death, was adapted into
a sharp-witted thriller, with Alec Bald-
win and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and I was
praying for a repeat with “The Burnt
Orange Heresy.” Everything’s in place,
and there’s not a weak link in the cast,
